Growth & Sustainability

ARIZONA The Arizona Supreme Court has cleared another hurdle from the path of conservation groups that want to lease state grazing land and return it to pre-grazing conditions. On Nov. 21, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled 4-1 that the state land department can’t deny conservation groups the right to bid on state grazing leases. The […]

UTAH Roads are again at the center of the long debate over Utah wilderness. Two environmental groups say they fear the Bureau of Land Management and the governor’s office have a secret deal in the works that would settle a dispute over Utah counties’ claims to thousands of dirt roads and trails on federal lands. […]

ARIZONA A coalition of developers, educators, ranchers and environmentalists has agreed to postpone an effort to preserve about 10 percent of Arizona’s 9.2 million acres of state trust land. Citing internal disagreement, the coalition has abandoned its attempt to put a preservation initiative on the 2002 ballot (HCN, 7/30/01: Not in our backyard). Since managers […]

Scores of Western public-land rangers are no longer at their regular jobs, patrolling rangeland for illegal off-road activities or investigating endangered species smuggling. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, rangers from the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service have been assigned to guard federal buildings in Washington, D.C., […]

UTAH Utah wilderness recently got a reprieve. In late June, a district judge ruled that three counties had illegally graded 16 undeveloped jeep tracks and footpaths located within Bureau of Land Management-maintained wilderness study areas and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The judge concluded that Garfield, Kane and San Juan counties had for several years […]

SOUTH DAKOTA Nearly three years ago, Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad (DM&E), based in Brookings, S.D., proposed the largest railroad expansion plan in a century. The $1.4 billion plan would upgrade 600 miles of existing track in Minnesota and South Dakota, and construct almost 300 miles of new track out of Wyoming into South Dakota. […]

UTAH After the federal government signed off on the construction of a 14-mile highway along Utah’s Wasatch Front in early January, a coalition of environmentalists and smart-growth advocates, including Salt Lake City’s controversial Democratic mayor, filed two separate lawsuits. Utahns for Better Transportation contends that the Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of […]